Performance Review Schedule
BambooHR® Performance Management is available for customers on BambooHR Pro. Click here to get an overview of the Pro plan or to schedule a demo.
What does a performance review schedule look like in Performance Management?
Purpose: To provide an overview of what will happen during each review cycle and share a few hints and tips for you to help the process run smoothly.
Table of Contents
Review cycles
With review cycles in Performance Management, you have two types of review periods: assessments and feedback. These two review periods are not related to each other, meaning they can overlap and that you can space them out throughout the year. You will need to determine the start date (either fixed or the employee's hire date) and frequency for both review periods when setting up review cycles in your account.
The review cycle setup allows you to set a performance review schedule and leave it to run according to its start dates. Therefore, running the review cycle will not require a lot of manual effort from you. The system will automatically send email notifications to your employees and managers to let them know what they will need to complete as part of a performance review cycle. If they have not completed the tasks by the due date, the system will send them reminders.
You will want to make sure that your employees have access to their BambooHR accounts so that they can actively participate in the performance review cycle, regardless of their access level settings. They can be a self-service user, a Full Admin user, or anything in between.
Goals
Employees' goals run independent of a review cycle. If you would like your employees to create and share goals, you will need to configure their access in Settings > Performance > Goals. More information on this process is in this help guide. With access granted, employees can start adding goals and track their goal progress on their employee profile.
Click here to learn more about the email notifications associated with goal tracking in BambooHR.
Encouraging your employees to start adding goals is one area where you can have an impact. While the system sends employees automatic reminders to update their goal progress, employees may need additional instructions from you to get them started.
Feedback
Are you subscribed to the Pro package? The Create a 360° Review Cycle help guide provides more information on the differences between peer and upward feedback.
The employee has a "soft" deadline of 14 days from the date of the request for submitting feedback. If they have not provided feedback by the 13th day, they will receive another email notification at 7 AM (company time zone). After 14 days, the employee will no longer receive notifications about the request, but they will have a total of 30 days to complete the request.
If the request is still incomplete 30 days after the date of request, the inbox notification will expire in BambooHR, and the employee will no longer be able to submit feedback until their manager submits a new request.
Example: A manager sent a request to an employee on January 3. The employee has a "soft" deadline of January 17th to submit their feedback. If they have not submitted the feedback by January 16, they will receive another email notification and have until February 2 to complete the feedback.
The feedback start date and frequency selected in the review cycle setup will determine when a feedback review period should begin. You can edit those settings by navigating to Settings > Performance and then selecting the name of the applicable review cycle. Keep in mind that the feedback review period and assessment review period are two separate periods and do not correlate with each other. Because of this, we recommend ensuring both review periods are accurate within the review cycle setup.
On the start date, managers will receive an email notification asking them to request feedback on their direct reports from up to ten employees each. Once the manager selects employees to provide feedback, these employees will receive an email notification and another notification in the What’s Happening widget. If managers have not selected employees within 14 days, they will receive an email notification as a reminder. Managers will receive a notification once an employee provides feedback, and they can view the feedback on the recipient's Performance tab.
Employees will never see feedback provided about them. It will be up to the manager to decide what information they should give to the employee.
If a manager needs to request feedback outside of a feedback review period, they can do so by navigating to the employee's Performance tab and requesting feedback from specific employees (10 open requests at time). From this point, email notifications and the deadline of 14 days will function the same as feedback included in an active feedback review period.
When feedback is requested from the employee's Performance tab (within an active review cycle or for impromptu feedback), it will default to the standard feedback questions, not custom questions.
Assessments
If an employee or manager has not completed their assessment by the due date, they still will have the option to submit their assessment after a review period ends.
Ten days before the assessments become available, admins will receive an email notification reminding them to review and adjust assessment questions (if needed). They cannot edit questions after the assessment review period starts.
The start date is based on the Next Window Start Date field for assessments in the review cycle setup. The system will send an automatic email notification to employees and managers, informing them that they can start their assessments. A notification will also show in the What’s Happening widget on Home in BambooHR. They will receive reminder emails ten days, three days, and one day before assessments are due if they have not completed the assessments.*
Assessments in BambooHR are double-blind, so an employee can only see their manager’s responses once they have completed the self assessment. Their managers only see the employee's responses once they have completed the manager assessment. This setup helps managers and employees provide a genuine and thoughtful assessment rather than agreeing with what the other party has said. Employees can never see managers' responses to the first two rating questions on the manager assessment.
The Assessment Progress report is the perfect tool to use for ensuring that all assessments are completed. It also helps HR admins recognize areas that need training and coaching for their employees and managers.
For example, I noticed that many manager assessments are still incomplete, so I sorted the report by the Manager column to see which managers I may need to help understand the importance of completing their assessments.